Chapter 2. Departure and Pursuit

The faintest sliver of sun was just cresting a hill to the east as Leontios checked his saddle girth one more time. The brown mare was a little bit lumpy. He hadn’t been riding her enough.

No matter. She was about to get enough exercise for a lifetime, he suspected.

Approximately one hundred feet away, at the edge of the gravel area that surrounded the house, Aurelian’s horse danced with the impatience of his rider.

The Hunter’s impatience was irrelevant. He wanted Leontios to join his party. That meant he wanted what Leontios could do.

And that meant that Leontios had to do it right.

He checked the knotting of the lead-line that connected the gray packhorse with white fetlocks to his own mare.

Everything is in order.

From the edge of the little road that led away from Leontios’s house, Aurelian shouted. “We really must be going!”

Leontios sighed and gave his home of more than two centuries one more look as he mounted.

He wasn’t perturbed by the separation—he had quested before—and it was not fear that the estate would fall into disrepair. He knew his inventions would take good care of the land and the home.

It was the bee. That strange little bee he had captured and studied for more than a year.

That strange little bee that had studied him for just as long.

He knew it was constructed, but it was also alive. It must consume something to continue living. So, he could not leave it trapped in a box while he was away for the gods only know how long.

When he opened its enclosure, it made no effort to leave. It just continued to stare at him.

I wonder if it will be there when I return, he mused.

“We must go,” Aurelian asserted, but Leontios barely heard him.

He gave a start as a hand gently touched his elbow. Eirleida had ridden up to his side without his notice, wearing a plaintive expression.

“Please,” she said. “It really is urgent.”

Leontios checked for the pendant around his neck with the little suit of armor in it one more time, and touched each of the bracelets with their own tiny suits of armor set into large steel ovals, then nodded.

Gently, he heeled his horse to a walk.

Aurelian may have been impatient, but the pace he set was sturdy at best. You don’t catch prey in a long chase by running your horse to death at the start.

In the morning shadows, the party snaked their way down through the low hills of Leontios’s estate in silence.

By the time the sun had just cleared the horizon behind them, they reached a hard-packed trail wide enough for two to ride abreast. That was what passed for the “main road” in such country, which was just as Leontios liked it.

Leontios hung back, lost in his thoughts, as Eirleida and Aurelian conferred. The Hunter shook his head briefly, but not as if in anger… an indication that he didn’t know something. After a moment, Eirleida pointed to the left.

So they were to head south, and then eventually southwest. All three turned their horses and began the long trek out of the Iberian high country.

Eirleida fell back to ride next to Leontios but said nothing. They rode in pleasant silence for more than half a mile. She seemed to be enjoying sights that, for centuries, Leontios had taken for granted.

It almost startled Leontios when she finally spoke.

“You are not of this land,” she said. “How did you come to Hispania?”

The Maker chuckled. “You are not of this land either, dear Seeker,” he answered.

“But you know how I came to be here. I am on a Hunt.”

“I moved to these hills when I experienced some trouble with the Romans. I did not wish to be found and this seemed far enough away.” Leontios smiled faintly. “By the time they conquered the peninsula, generations had passed, and I was forgotten.”

“You could have gone back.”

“I stayed for a reason you would hardly believe.”

Leontios felt Eirleida turn to peer at him, and he smiled at the joke he was about to make of himself.

“The pork,” he said finally. “I stayed for the pork.”

Eirleida burst out laughing. Her mildly pleasant appearance seemed to blossom in her rich laugh, which quickly devolved into mirth-filled gasps and sputters.

Once she regained some measure of composure, she asked, “You stayed in the hinterlands for pork? Really?”

“Really.”

“And what of you? You’re on a Hunt, yet it happened to take you past my estates. How did the Council know it would?”

Eirleida’s joviality vanished and was replaced by solemnity.

“You,” she said timidly. “You’re not the only one. There was a list,” she turned toward him and reached out an assuring hand. “A very short list, mind you. Of those we could recruit if the Hunt took us near. You are on it, and we got lucky when his trail took us near your home.”

“Interesting…”

The Maker reached into his coat, pulled out the knucklebone he often toyed with, and began to think.

They rode in silence for a little more than another half mile, Leontios thinking and Eirleida apparently taking in the sights.

“Does he have a name?” asked Leontios.

Eirleida remained silent. The silence stretched long enough that he wondered if she had heard him. Yet, when he turned to look at her, she was peering down at her hands, biting her lip.

It’s a yes or no question, he thought. So she must not want to answer.

“I see,” he said aloud.

“It—” she began in one of the false starts he was beginning to recognize as part of her manner. “It is not clear if the Council knows and does not wish to tell or merely does not know.”

“What do we know of him?” Leontios put a slight emphasis on the word do.

“He is cunning. And dangerous. The Council says that, if we face him, we will feel he is so weak as to be no threat at all. Yet we are not to underestimate him. We must treat him as if he is a better Fighter than Aurelian, perhaps as a better Maker than you. Even if we are certain he is neither.”

“Hardly a cheering start and not very helpful when it comes to finding him.”

“He seems able to confuse our senses, sometimes.”

“Now that is interesting. How does he do it?”

Eirleida flushed, possibly with embarrassment but more likely with anger, it appeared.

“We don’t know,” she answered.

“I meant, ‘What is it like when he confuses your senses?’”

“Ah,” was all she said.

They rode on in silence for a few minutes.

“He is there,” she said. “Then he is not. I can tell where he is. Then I cannot. I think he’s in front of us when he’s behind or behind when he’s in front.”

Another pause as she appeared to collect her thoughts.

Then she added, “Aurelian has a similar experience. He’ll pick up the trail and then it will end. He seems to be able to lay a false trail that sends us in the wrong direction and then simply ends. At the same time, he seems able to somehow mask his trail so that Aurelian’s Hunting sense—possibly the finest in the world—cannot follow.

“In the general sense, the two of us are able to follow him. Yet, every time we get close, he confuses our abilities and slips away.”

“Very strange,” Leontios said.

“There’s—There’s something else you should know.”

“Which is?”

“Sometimes it feels like… Almost as if… As if he comes into our camp at night. Aurelian cannot stand watch all night, and I’m not much use in that. It’s just a feeling. Aurelian says I’m simply allowing myself to become flustered, but I’m not so sure.”

“Very interesting…”

The two rode on in silence, following Aurelian as he followed the road downward, toward the flatlands that were still almost a week away.

In the quiet of the ride, with only the clop of the horse’s hooves on the hard-packed dirt, a familiar sound poked through into Leontios’s consciousness. He might not have heard it if they were still talking. He definitely wouldn’t if they had been riding any harder.

A faint buzz, growing louder.

From behind, a bee zipped into his vision and landed on his gloved hand.

It peered up at him, seeming to study.

Taking the reins in his left hand, he brought his right up toward his face so he could see the bee more clearly.

Was it the one he had captured?

For a moment, the bee was a blackish streak tracing from his hand up, and off toward the southwestern horizon. Then it was gone.

The tightness in Aurelian’s middle had lessened considerably by the time the party made camp, with the last crest of the sun sinking behind ridges to the west.

The spot they chose was good for defending, though he wasn’t sure if that mattered. They were, after all, the Hunters and not the hunted.

Still, the day care was abandoned was the day it was needed.

As usual, Eirleida wanted to sleep as close to him as possible. She had put her blankets right next to his.

At first, that had made him uncomfortable. He thought, perhaps, she was attempting to alter their relationship.

Another time, he might have welcomed such an advance, but not when he was on a Hunt. Or at least, not this Hunt.

When it was time to move, it was time to move. When it was time to rest, it was time to rest. There was no time for distractions, however pleasant they might be.

Only later did he realize that her desire for proximity had something to do with fear. She felt safer next to him than she did twenty feet away.

The woman was an insufferable coward. Yet suffer her he must, because only together did they have any hope of tracking their quarry.

It set his teeth against each other that he had so little to go on.

‘A man,’ they said, he thought angrily. ‘Dangerous,’ they said. ‘Dire mission,’ they said.

Such tidbits had proved fruitless in his Hunt.

Even more infuriating was the man’s ability—seemingly with ease—to confound his tracking ability.

Never before had he been unsure of his powers. He had hunted strange and powerful prey who had escaped him before, at least temporarily. It was not impossible to put enough distance between Hunter and prey that the Hunter loses the trail.

But laying a false trail? That had never happened before. And it spoke of uncomfortable implications.

Aurelian sighed and chastised himself for wasting energy on what he could not change.

“I will take first watch,” he said.

“There’s no need for that,” was Leontios’s infuriatingly calm answer. Aurelian turned to face the Maker, whose back was turned as he rummaged in one of the packs he had brought.

Eirleida, who was brushing down her delicate-legged black mare, seemed to have frozen mid-stroke as she stared at him. “No watch?” she breathed. “We keep no watch tonight?” Her fair skin was somehow turning whiter.

Leontios shook his head in dismissal. “I did not say no watch. I said there’s no need for one of us to lose sleep to keep it. Ah. Here they are.”

In his hand was what appeared to be a small wooden box attached to a leather bag. Yet, even as he showed it, the leather bag started to expand, puffing as if filling itself with air.

After just a few moments, the bag was floating above Leontios’s hand and tugging at the box. A moment more and it was lifting the box into the air.

Already holding another small box, the Maker began to explain. “They will keep a better watch than any of us. They can see in the dark like cats. If they see him, or any other kind of threat, they will make a loud noise and mark its position with a light.”

“They will try to follow, too,” he added in what seemed like an afterthought, “but they won’t go too far from the camp.”

“The jellyfish can watch better than we,” continued the Maker, “and you can get a full night of rest. Or,” he added with a wry twist of the mouth, “at least as much rest as can be had between sundown and sunup.”

Eirleida started awake to a shrill scream from the sky. It took her a moment to realize what it was. By the time she was out of her blankets, Aurelian was already standing in a bright pool of light surrounding their packs and saddlebags, spear in hand.

Groggily, Leontios stumbled into the pool of light. Wearing only his breeches, it was clear he was more muscular than his soft-looking face would have suggested.

“Well,” the Maker croaked, “at least we know they can spot him.”

“How?” Aurelian growled. “I sense no trail. I don’t think he was here.”

Leontios merely shrugged. “Perhaps he can confuse their senses, too. Or maybe it was just a woodland animal the Jellyfish considered a threat to our food supply.”

He looked up at the Jellyfish and both the screech and the light ceased.

“We must rest if we are to pursue him in the morning.”

The next several days leading out of the Iberian high country were much the same. Long days riding were punctuated by short conversations that exchanged little useful information.

It was the nights that were the problem. As soon as it was dark—even as soon as there were shadows—Eirleida began to feel eyes on her. Usually behind her, peering at her back, and vanishing when she turned to look at them.

Being near Aurelian helped her control her fear. For some reason, she felt safer the closer she was to him.

But it was not enough.

The eyes were there. She could feel them. It didn’t matter what anyone else said.

The Jellyfish screamed alert again the second night, which Aurelian took to mean they were useless, but she took as a bad omen.

The third night was worse. The Jellyfish gave no cry of alarm, yet one of the horses’ hobbles had somehow been cut. Aurelian claimed that it had simply been a frayed rope that snapped, but the cut was too clean. It had to have been done with some kind of blade.

Leontios appeared to be experiencing the disturbance. More than once, he would rummage through his saddlebags, grumbling that he couldn’t find something, only to discover it was somewhere completely different from where he expected it.

The fifth day had been particularly hot, and she had needed to hang her riding dress up to dry. She found it crumpled on the ground the next morning. Aurelian claimed it had likely been an animal, or perhaps she had hung the dress improperly. As if she didn’t know how to hang a dress!

He claimed he didn’t sense it. Yet Eirleida was certain that Aurelian could feel their quarry harassing them at night, too.

There were little changes in his behavior that confirmed her belief. He triple-checked all the hobbling every night—even on the nights when he hobbled the horses. He had nearly forbidden anyone from consuming stored food or water before Leontios produced a device that could test such things for safety.

He was most definitely feeling insecure.

It was their final night in the highlands when it all came to a head, though.

Eirleida’s wits were so frazzled that she had barely managed to fall asleep, even when lying so close to Aurelian that the two were almost touching. Eventually, though, exhaustion won out, and she fell asleep under the waxing gibbous moon.

She awoke gripped with fear such as she had not felt before.

Something was very wrong. She forced herself to open her eyes and carefully peered around the camp. There was nothing. No sound. No trace.

Yet she knew something was wrong. Panic was beginning to set in. Not knowing what was wrong was worse than the fact that something was wrong.

Then she caught a glimpse out of the corner of her eye. Slowly, she turned her head left, to face the setting moon.

There it was. On a rocky outcropping overlooking the camp.

The black silhouette of a man sitting atop the black silhouette of a horse, looking down on the camp.

The moon behind the man ensured that she could see no details. She couldn’t see a face, but she was sure—absolutely certain—he was looking directly at her. Watching her.

Terror froze her, snatching the scream from her throat. She clutched her blanket as if it were a shield of the finest steel that could protect her from the dark figure on the rise.

She wanted to cry out, to demand the men awaken, to warn the camp of the threat, but she could not. Fright paralyzed her.

Her torpor was broken by a shrill cry from the hill, and a bright beam of light burst into existence on the dark rider. Even in the light, he seemed little brighter. He wore a low, broad-brimmed black hat that obscured his face and a black cloak obscured his body.

The light and warning cry startled the man’s black horse, which reared and screamed what sounded like a war cry.

It all happened in an instant, and in that same instant, Aurelian had shot bolt upright in his blankets.

The next moment, he was a streaking blur in the moonlight. Then he was standing atop the outcropping in the pool of light, gripping his spear and looking about wildly.

Another streak became Leontios atop the same outcropping.

She drew a ragged breath in a desperate bid for composure. Then she covered herself as decently as she was able under the circumstances, and Raced to the top of the outcropping.

Time seemed to almost stop. The campfire’s last embers’ pulsing glow steadied. Treetops stirring in a gentle breeze froze mid-bend.

She clutched the blanket she had wrapped around herself and picked her way toward the bluff, then found a goat trail that would allow her to get to the top of the ridge.

“At least we know they work on him,” said Leontios.

“Unless he can confuse their senses as he can mine and Eirleida’s.”

Leontios shook his head vigorously. “No. You said you can sense his trail, here.”

“But it is another of those trails that begins and ends right here. It could be a false trail.”

A brown and white streak became Eirleida standing delicately, gingerly trying to find comfortable placement for bare feet on the ragged outcropping.

“I do not think so. All of the times they have given the warning cry, there has been a plausible reason to believe it was him.”

“I admit that letting them keep watch is better than wasting time that could be spent resting, Maker. But how can I trust your Jellyfish’s senses when I cannot even trust my own?”

“He—” Eirleida broke in, and both men turned to stare at her.

“He was here,” she continued. She swallowed hard and then added, “I—I saw him.”

Aurelian’s face turned red, seeming a hot coal glowing in the bright light of the Jellyfish. “You saw him and you said nothing?”

“He was so…” She appeared to be shaking as she spoke. “So terrifying. A black figure. Sitting on a black horse. Staring down at—at me.” She took a deep breath as if to settle herself. “Not at the camp. At me. I wanted to cry out… but I froze.”

Aurelian’s jaw worked as if he was chewing on something unpleasant. “He was here. Right here with us. We could have.”

The Hunter seemed to visibly seize control of his own body. First his limbs straightened. Then his shoulders squared. Then his spine straightened, and his chin lifted.

“No matter,” he said in a strained voice. “If he’s come back for us, it means he’s close.”

He had a horse? thought Leontios. Very interesting indeed.